Driver’s License

Broadway transforms “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Scottsboro Boys.”

I felt I had every reason to roll my eyes when I heard that Alfred Uhry’s 1987 play “Driving Miss Daisy” (now in revival at the Golden, directed by David Esbjornson) and the new musical “The Scottsboro Boys” (at the Lyceum, directed by Susan Stroman) were both opening on Broadway. My cynicism was based less on my experience of either show—I didn’t see “The Scottsboro Boys” when it played at the Vineyard earlier this year, and I would have liked to have watched Morgan Freeman in the original Off Broadway production of “Driving Miss Daisy”—than on Broadway’s customary banal or condescending take on racial and cultural politics. A musical about the famous nineteen-thirties Alabama interracial rape case—really? And Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in Uhry’s paper-thin character study about a widowed Jewish former schoolteacher and her black, functionally illiterate driver? I didn’t want to imagine any of it.

But an actor can make anything happen onstage, particularly artists of the calibre of Redgrave and Jones, who can cook up a rich pot out of tepid water. The performers in “The Scottsboro Boys” work with a surfeit of material, some of it exceptional, but in “Driving Miss Daisy” Esbjornson has a different challenge. Uhry’s lightweight script could have been a hindrance to Esbjornson’s vision but becomes instead an opportunity to collaborate with his actors.

The seventy-three-year-old Uhry was born in Atlanta. After graduating from Brown, he headed to New York, with the aim of becoming a musical-theatre lyricist. He had a champion, Frank Loesser, the popular Broadway composer, but Uhry’s early shows flopped. It wasn’t until 1975, when he and the composer Robert Waldman adapted Eudora Welty’s saccharine 1942 novella “The Robber Bridegroom” to the stage, that Uhry’s skills as a lyricist were recognized.

“Driving Miss Daisy” was his first play; it won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His early work as a lyricist no doubt informs the great care Uhry uses in composing his easy-listening scenes. Writing in a spare mode that’s reminiscent of Horton Foote—a play’s a play because it’s about a family, and families are always dramatic—Uhry adds a kind of bloodless social conscience. His message sneaks up on you, because the last thing that the polite-minded author would ever impose is his own didacticism. But it’s there. He’s interested in the past in the majority of his work, it seems, because it allows for his retrograde impulses. His characters just stumble into historical events.

At the start of the play, Daisy Werthan (Vanessa Redgrave) is seventy-two years old and lives in a comfy house in Atlanta. Outside blow the winds of change; it’s 1948, and soon the civil-rights movement will gather momentum. No matter, at least for now. Mrs. Werthan is content to go to synagogue and to shop for necessities. But her son, Boolie (Boyd Gaines), doesn’t want her to drive anymore; she’s had an accident backing out of her driveway. He wants to hire a chauffeur, which is the last thing Mrs. Werthan wants. Not only would a stranger make her feel uncomfortable—imagine the cost! As she battles with her son, she makes a cake. She stirs the batter angrily, torn between her desire for a little confection and her desire to get Boolie out of her kitchen. With her forceful stop-and-start movements, Redgrave tells us who her character is: she’s a woman of action, not someone who’s apt to talk about her feelings as she grows anxious and defensive in her increasingly difficult efforts at self-sufficiency.

Despite his mother’s protestations, Boolie hires a driver, a black man named Hoke Coleburn (James Earl Jones). Right away, Hoke knows what he’s up against. He’ll have to shoehorn himself into Miss Daisy’s graces, somehow—maybe by showing his vulnerability (he’s been out of work for a while). But Hoke isn’t as open with Boolie as he is with Miss Daisy; after all, Boolie is a white Southern man. Hoke has acted a white person’s idea of “colored” all his life. In Boolie’s office, Jones plays the befuddled Negro, but with sorrow. His long Buster Keaton face tells us how little has changed racially since he was a boy. But Jones doesn’t reveal the various masks Hoke wears straight off; he does it by degrees, even as he shows his spiritual fatigue in his hunched shoulders, slow gait, and watchfulness.

As Hoke’s relationship with Miss Daisy moves from antagonism and paranoia to hope and dependence, Redgrave and Jones rely less on the script for dramatic power. (Esbjornson shows time passing by periodically projecting slides of current events on the rear wall of John Lee Beatty’s evocative set.) They tailor the text to fit their own talents by using it as a jumping-off point for their shared theatrical imagination. In so doing, the show’s stars say what Uhry does not: how complicated and different and alike this Jewish woman and this black man are, both trying to live in the world unvictimized by their outsider status.

Watching the pair, it was tempting to imagine them in material that deserved their mettle—an adaptation of Bernard Malamud’s stories about blacks and Jews, say. But Uhry’s episodic script supplies the actors with a certain freedom: they can’t feel as responsible for the play’s language as they might if “Driving Miss Daisy” were a great piece. Instead, Redgrave and Jones honor each other’s power as they rewrite Uhry’s script with their what-could-be-better-than-performing bodies.

Joshua Henry’s black and beautiful body is Susan Stroman’s political and aesthetic focus in “The Scottsboro Boys.” As Haywood Patterson, in the composer John Kander and the lyricist Fred Ebb’s unsettling, often brilliant, sometimes mechanical-seeming musical, it’s left to Henry to tell it like it is for his fellow-prisoners—the eight other black men wrongly accused of rape by two white women with whom they shared a freight train. Because Henry has a defined sense of self, and is less fearful than the others about expressing rage, he’s often punished for his outspokenness, which his lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz (the frightening and powerful Forrest McClendon, who plays multiple roles in the play), tries to temper by coaching Henry to be a less threatening version of a black man—a coon.

Kander and Ebb—who produced, over a forty-two-year musical partnership (Ebb died in 2004), such works as “Cabaret” and “Chicago”—were known for the political content of their work, which Stroman emphasizes, particularly in the complicated role of Jewish liberals who became involved in the case, and the white Christians who held sway in the Scottsboro Boys’ Southern hell. But sometimes it feels as if Stroman pulls back from the ugliness of the material by stressing that the piece is an entertainment, with lots of dancing. It seems contradictory, especially since “The Scottsboro Boys” also borrows from minstrel shows, including a white Interlocutor (a tired-seeming John Cullum), who is the only cast member not of color.

Instead of exhibiting the ominous horror that Bob Fosse brought to the 1972 film version of “Cabaret,” Stroman cheats a bit, and sneaks in too many moments of razzmatazz sparkle and likability. I understand the impulse: “The Scottsboro Boys” is a lot for Broadway audiences to take. But is it too much to ask that they do? ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994.